If you haven’t made the switch yet, or at the very least, thought about it at this point, you are way behind the eight ball. What are we talking about? SSL, otherwise known as, secure sockets layer. Whether you realize it or not, if you’ve used the Internet for more than two seconds in your life, you’ve experienced SSL. See that lock symbol in the url bar of this page? That is SSL, and it means this page, similar to our entire website, is secure.

So why is SSL important? Well, the answer is actually quite simple. In the past, the conventional wisdom was that the only websites that needed to have SSL were the ones that accepted sensitive information from its visitors. As one might expect, generally speaking, this primarily applied to e-commerce websites, on which companies would allow customers to purchase items using credit cards. Without SSL, credit card information and other sensitive data, can easily be intercepted/stolen, which is obviously bad for both businesses and customers. When no credit card or other sensitive data is involved, the need for SSL decreases significantly, but it certainly doesn’t completely vanish.

According to the latest edition of the annual Internet Trends report published by Silicon Valley venture capitalists Mary Meeker and Liang Wu, there are now more than 2.4 billion people worldwide who use the Internet. As astonishing as that number is, however, it doesn’t even include the number of individuals now using smartphones, which also have Internet browsing capabilities – that number tops 5 billion worldwide! The crazy part is that both of the preceding numbers are growing rapidly.

e-commerce in the US is well on its way to reaching an estimated $370 billion by 2017

Given those astonishing numbers, it should come as no surprise that the consumer marketplace on the world wide web is growing just as quickly. According to Forrester, e-commerce in the US, which topped $231 billion in 2012, is well on its way to reaching an estimated $370 billion by 2017. Moreover, online sales, which already account for 8% of total retail sales, are not only expected to continue their blazing fast growth, but are also on pace to eclipse traditional brick-and-mortar shops.